“soon enough we’ll all be
sleeping together, beyond
all things that ever mattered”
(Ron Rash, “Black-Eyed Susans”)

1David Miller’s 1962 western movie Lonely Are the Brave, inspired by Edward Abbey’s 1956 novel The Brave Cowboy, which was adapted into a screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, starts with a striking scene. The opening scene focuses on a 20th century version of the lonesome cowboy under the features of American actor Kirk Douglas, who would later admit this was his favorite role ever: the landscape in which he is shown napping, while his mare tries hard to get his attention, is one of vast deserted plains, arid and yellow with drought. Yet the clear sky of that typically Western scenery is conspicuously traversed by a passing plane—the first indication that the Conquest of the West is far behind. After breaking camp, man and horse resume their journey across the plains. The second detail betraying the fact that the spectator is actually faced with the anachronistic lifestyle of a singular individual in a movie that both borrows from the tradition of the western and cunningly plays with its codes, is the no trespassing sign that hinders the cowboy’s trajectory. Indeed, after mumbling his disapproval, the latter cuts into the endless barbed wire fence that, together with the sign, reveals that the vast plains traditionally associated with wild pursuits and the quest for freedom now fall under the laws of proprietorship. But the brave are not to be intimidated by such obstacles.

2American novelist, short story writer and poet Ron Rash belongs to and is inspired by a scenery that is quite different. Born in Chester, South Carolina, he is currently the Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. He is the author of four collections of poems, six collections of short stories (the fourth of which, Burning Bright, won the prestigious Frank O’Connor award in 2010; his most recent collection, In the Valley, appeared in 2020) and seven novels, all published in a relatively brief timespan of unrelenting creativity. His first novel, One Foot in Eden, was published in 2002; his latest, The Risen, in 2016. He also recently published a volume of selected stories, Something Rich and Strange (2014), as well as Poems {Selected and New} (2016b). Ron Rash probably owes the forever growing international attention he now enjoys to the publication of Serena (published in 2008, the novel was a 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist), whose plot retraces the fate of a Lady Macbeth-like figure at the head of a timber business in the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina, at the beginning of the 1930s. Serena has been adapted into a movie by Susan Bier and into a graphic novel by Paris-based publisher Sarbacane.1

3As it is the case for William Faulkner, whose work he greatly admires, Ron Rash’s world is a restricted one. From one book to the next, whether he writes prose or poetry, Rash keeps exploring his “own little postage stamp of native soil,” which, in Faulkner’s words, is “worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.”2 Both writers similarly work on a tight regional scale, with an acute sense of cultural frontiers and local particulars, from which they derive universal dramas:

You are often characterized as an Appalachian writer. In what ways is this appropriate? Is it limiting?

It’s certainly appropriate, my family has lived in the North Carolina Mountains for about 250 years, so I am of the region and the region is my spirit country, I guess you could say. But though there is no doubt I’m very proud to be Appalachian, I am sometimes worried that when we put adjectives in front of “writer” there’s a sense that he or she is only that. If my work only appeals to people in the region, then I’ve failed as a writer because I think what we want to do is what Eudora Welty said: “One place understood helps us understand all other places better.” So by writing about a particular place, I also hope I’m writing about all other places as well. (Mincey 2017, 111)

4Like Faulkner before him, Rash is convinced that the places where we live and evolve have a strong influence on what individuals become, and that a writer’s thorough examination of a restricted place3 constitutes a privileged ingress into universality: “One thing that really interests me is how the most regional work is often the most universal” (Lang 2014, 344). Because of its unquestionable focus on a rather restricted area in the Appalachian Mountains, because he is understandably stamped as a Southern writer with, in keeping with the tradition, a particularly sharp sense for place, Ron Rash’s literary exploitation of his deeply rural region is central to his critics’ examination of his writing. But rather than taking in the wide picture—a picture wide enough to contain mountains—this paper will focus on the recurrence of one particular image in Ron Rash’s writing,4 that of barbed wire, which, as in the case of the movie scene evoked earlier, is fraught with variegated symbolic undertones. Barbed wire fences indeed fragment a large part of the scenery Rash’s writing relentlessly examines, revealing both social, cultural and personal tensions. Moreover, its very recurrence throughout his fiction and his poetry paradoxically illustrates the way the writer boundlessly navigates between genres.

I. Barbed Wire, Passion and Revenge in One Foot in Eden

5Rash’s first novel, One Foot in Eden, illustrates the writer’s extensive and polyvalent use of barbed wire imagery particularly well. First, the plot demonstrates how barbed wire encapsulates man’s urge to draw boundaries in order to mark his territory. Indeed, early in the novel, Holland Winchester, a veteran from the Korean War, puts up a barbed wire fence between what’s left of Winchester land and the part of it his late father sold to Billy Holcomb.5 Here is Billy’s reminiscence of his purchasing land from Jacob Winchester, who first mistook him for a potential sharecropper: “‘A Holcomb owning land,’ he said, then smiled. ‘You’re getting above your raising, boy’” (Rash 2002a, 121). Billy is indeed the first Holcomb who’s ever accessed ownership, thus disregarding deeply entrenched class boundaries. Holland’s need for protection is, therefore, double: he needs to protect his land from a neighbor’s impingement upon the land of his family; he also needs to protect his own status against a new owner moving up the social ladder. His choice of barbed wire as the material for his fence is, of course, highly symbolical. Barbed wire fencing is cheap; it requires only fence posts, wire, and fixing devices like nails. It is simple to construct and quick to erect. Yet with its clusters of short, sharp spikes set at short intervals along the wire, it bears its message quite straightforwardly: do not trespass; were you ever tempted to do so, you might get hurt. Though less conspicuous and much less solid than other fencing devices, barbed wire is doubtless conceived as a threat; it means to be hurtful, to wound and thus brand the trespasser.6

6In the plot of One Foot in Eden, two events are significantly made to coincide. As Amy, Billy’s young wife, comes back from consulting Widow Glendower, a witch of some sort, hoping to find a solution to her infertile marriage, she comes across Holland Winchester for the first time:

I was almost onto our land when I heard what sounded like gun shots on the high ground a ways up the ridge. I stepped out of the trees so I could have a better look-see. A man with no shirt on hammered barbed wire to fresh-sawed fence posts. I knew it would be but one man. (Rash 2002a, 79)

7This is a particularly interesting coincidence. Amy is, indeed, coming home with a baffling piece of advice from the old witch. Since the herbs and tonics she first tried obviously didn’t work, the older woman suggested that Amy should try to remedy her barrenness by resorting to her charms: “All you got to do is let him see them charms, see all of them. He’ll give you a baby” (Rash 2002a, 78). Of course, by “him” and “he” she means another man than Billy. As, with the Window’s recommendation in her ears, Amy observes the half-naked man building up a fence between “our land” and his, she “knew it would be but one man.” Her conclusion can be interpreted in two ways: not only is she able to identify him (though she has never met him) as the homecoming veteran living next door, she also understands that she will not find a better stud. In other words, Holland Winchester is depicted starting to build up a barbed wire fence at the very same time as Amy is unconsciously devising a plan in which the boundary that is being erected will have to be trespassed, in many literal and symbolical ways. What’s more, that Holland’s distant hammering should evoke the sound of gun shots ominously imbues the developments to come with a very palpable tension, which, of course, will soon reach a peak.

8It turns out that Widow Glendower was right; Amy’s charms constitute a magic potion of their own. One sight of her and the veteran trespasses the barbed wire fence he has not even finished putting up for his own protection. Though menacing, barbed wire therefore turns out to be a rather flimsy, precarious and easily passable kind of boundary. In this case, the barbed wire fence can actually be construed as an invitation to transgression. Indeed, behind Billy’s back, Amy and Holland soon get into a little routine of their own: “Morning and afternoon I’d lay down with him on the quilt back of the house or in the woods or in the barn, anywhere but me and Billy’s bed” (Rash 2002a, 87). Both the frequency of their intercourse and the variety of places in which the lovers frolic show how pleasurable the transgression is, therefore illustrating a timeless commonplace: crossing the (barbed wire) line sharpens desire. Yet, at the same time as she boldly learns to “unbuckle [Holland’s] belt” (Rash 2002a, 88)—thus challenging another boundary of some sort—, Amy also carefully sets new limits. No talking, no kissing, no laying on Billy’s bed, even though she is fully aware of their futility: “But that was near about all I didn’t allow him. He did things to me Billy never had, things I’d never reckoned a man would know to do a woman” (Rash 2002a, 87). Containment and restrictions are particularly pointless when both attraction and satisfaction are so strong. Nevertheless, as soon as Holland and Amy are done, she callously sends him away: “‘You best get back to you fence-making,’ I said” (Rash 2002a, 85). As she bluntly gets rid of her lover before she risks betraying her feelings—or he his—, Amy also asks him to fence himself out of her way.

9Desired by Amy, Holland develops an exacerbated version of his already reckless old self, forcing even Billy to realize that whenever he comes near, trouble looms:

Holland Winchester straddled the barbed wire fence beside the white oak and walked in the front yard, the same way he came in April when I’d sighted him from this very field. Even when Holland was having his way with another man’s wife he was too proud to skulk around back like a hound stealing eggs from a hen-house. No, that wasn’t ever his way of doing things. (Rash 2002a, 124)

10Narrated from Billy’s first-person perspective, this passage reveals that Billy is in the know and has been for a while. Yet what can he do in order to stop Amy from trying to obtain what he cannot give her? Billy’s outright admiration for his rival’s pluck and manliness is quite obvious and understandable; so is his hatred of the man: “I stood with the reins around my neck and hoped that Holland would go back over to his side of the fence and leave us alone, because unlike Holland I didn’t know if I was a brave man” (Rash 2002a, 124). Holland’s very existence makes Billy doubt his own worth. Soon the only solution for Billy to deal with Holland’s brashness, and with Amy’s pregnancy, is for one of the two men to leave the stage; therefore, when Holland claims Amy and the baby as his, Billy kills him at point blank range; but this is yet another story.

11What I would like to comment on is how Billy deals with the corpse of his enemy, showing an efficient practicality that soon overpowers Amy’s uncertainties about what to do next. Aware of the fact he “‘shot an unarmed man, a war hero” and “[t]hat’s the only truth a jury would care about’” (Rash 2002a, 130), Billy gets ready and equipped to dispose of Holland’s body: “I picked up the hoe and shotgun and laid the roll of barbed wire across my shoulder like a haversack. The barbs jabbed my shoulders like thorns on a devil’s walking stick. There was nothing to be done about that” (Rash 2002a, 131). The physical punishment Billy imposes upon himself certainly echoes Christ’s suffering during the Passion, though the parallel becomes even more evident as the reader realizes what Billy aims to do with the barbed wire:

I shimmied on down and tied one rope end under Holland’s arms and the other around Sam’s neck. I pushed and twisted the roll of barbed wire over Holland’s head till it laid around his neck like a yoke. The barbs tore into his face and back of his head in the most awful kind of way but I knew in my heart it was not near as awful as taking his life. (Rash 2002a, 136)

12Holland’s corpse now wears a barbed wire crown that clearly evokes the crown of thorns Christ’s captors placed on his head with a view to causing him pain and to mocking his claim of authority. As the symbolism of barbed wire keeps evolving throughout the novel, Holland somehow experiences a second death—a double death—, as his corpse is further tortured, this time evoking the figure of Christ on the cross: “I wrapped it tight and close as bark on a tree, mashing the arms against his sides, letting the barbs cut deep in his skin” (Rash 2002a, 137). Billy’s sense of jubilation at pulping his rival’s corpse is quite palpable. At the same time, his literal elimination of Holland is the only way for Billy to recover his self-esteem and his sense of manhood, and to come to terms with the possibility of becoming a father for Amy’s child: with his hand on Amy’s belly, “for the first time I duly felt that young one was mine too and that damped my eyes. I made promises to myself and God to be a good daddy. I thought about the sinner on the cross Jesus saved and prayed God and Jesus to forgive me” (Rash 2002a, 154). The irony of the barbed wire symbolism culminates in Billy’s evoking Crucifixion and asking for forgiveness to God for a crime aggravated by an atrocious mutilation.

II. A Curling Metaphor

13Images of barbed wire fences also scatter Ron Rash’s short fiction and poetry; their very recurrence thus endows them with a special status in the writer’s poetics, while their symbolic purport keeps evolving, curling.7 There are, indeed, barbed wire fences throughout Rash’s world, all over the places he describes. One of the most regular features of his scenery, with which they often end up merging, barbed wire fences first separate home from over there. In the last stage of “Into the Gorge,” a short story built on the motifs of possession and dispossession while developing a strong sense of loss, as Jesse believes, just for a moment, that the manhunt across the forest—once “communal” (Rash 2010, 135), now “U.S. Park Service” (136)—, of which he is the accidental prey has come to an end, he fantasizes the comfort of home through the touch of barbed wire:

Jesse moved quietly up the logging road. Get back in the house and you’ll be all right, he told himself. He came to the iron gate and slipped under. It struck him only then that someone might be waiting at his house. He went to the left and stopped where a barbed-wire fence marked the pasture edge. The house lights were still off, like he’d left them. Jesse’s hand touched a strand of sagging barbed wire and he felt a vague reassurance in its being there, its familiarity. (Rash 2010, 148)

14At the same time as Jesse’s contact with the fence brings him a brief sense of relief, together with the hope that things might still be “all right,” the fact it is sagging suggests that his familiar landmarks have definitely come loose and, eventually, that there is no returning to the world that used to be his. Both fenced in and out of place, Jesse literally finds himself in a no man’s land, which echoes his doom.

15The poem entitled “Watershed,” published in Waking, evokes a child’s “willing[ness] to straddle barbed wire” (Rash 2013, 50) in order to explore the wide world beyond the fence and see for himself beyond the familiar limits of home. In other instances, barbed wire fences are associated with local superstitions and folklore, thus marking the separation between cold rational thought, for which, “the world” tends to be “irrelevant and mute” and diverse forms of believing that are inclined to trust the senses and “[live] by the signs” (Rash 2010, 169)8. This is the case of a poem entitled “Drought,” published in Rash’s first collection of poems, Eureka Mill: “Blacksnakes we’d shared / barns with years / fleshed our barbed wire fences” (Rash 2008, 4). An observation made by one of the narrators in One Foot in Eden clarifies the meaning of this custom: “The old folks claimed you could kill a blacksnake and lay it on the fence and it would bring rain” (Rash 2002b, 124). As in the case of Rash’s first novel, in the narrative poem “Black-Eyed Susans,” collected in Raising the Dead, which was published the same year9, barbed wire fences are integral to the telling of a tale of love and death, marking the sometimes precarious boundary between two worlds. The poem, which bears the name of a yellow flower whose vivid brightness often appears in Rash’s work, is told from the perspective of a bereaved husband, in the position of the speaker:

as I drove
my tractor up on the ridge
to the far pasture where strands
of sagging barbed wire marked where
my land stopped, church land began,
knowing I’d find some grave-gift,
flowers, flags, styrofoam cross
blown on my land, and so first
walked the boundary, made sure what
belonged on the other side
got returned
(Rash 2002b, 26)

16Barbed wire marks the limit between “my land” and “church land,” between the living and the dead; but, once again, it is “sagging,” which suggests how short-lived and questionable such frontiers may be. Indeed, while the speaker cleans his land, making sure objects blown from the neighboring cemetery are returned where they “belon[g]” (a verb that, significantly, occurs twice in the poem), he is reminded that his late wife’s enduring feelings for her first husband, who died three months into their marriage, couldn’t possibly be contained by such a frail separation. While those “three months” are opposed to the “three decades” of their own marriage, he is forced to admit that he has altogether been powerless in the face of a single word, “Always,” “always their love in first bloom.” But, finally reconciled with the incontrovertible fact that “soon enough we’ll all be / sleeping together, beyond / all things that ever mattered” (Rash 2002b, 26), he sometimes “cross[es] the pasture” and pays homage to that unassailable “bloom” by “bring[ing] / black-eyed susans for her grave, / leav[ing] a few on his as well.”

17A few pages later in the same collection, at the beginning of “At Reid Hartley’s Junkyard,” a mourning mother trespasses another barbed wire fence, which is delimiting the site of the junkyard: “To enter we find the gap / between barbed wire and briars” (Rash 2002b, 42), in search of the carcass of the car in which her son died, in search of “something to carry / from this wreckage.” Once again, the fence is a particularly precarious one, fated to be passed despite, or because of, the sanction it represents; meanwhile, it suggests that the living and the dead live in a contiguous world. Images of finitude also pervade “The Bridge,” a title that similarly encapsulates antithetical notions of separation and connection: “Barbed wire snags like briars when / fence posts rot in goldenrod, / the cows are gone, the cowpath / a thinning along the creek” (Rash 2013, 54). Long gone cows and the weakening cowpath conjure up the intertwined motifs of disappearing and leaving traces, which keep haunting the poet—in the heart of it, the “[b]arbed wire snags” testify to man’s once vain attempts to master his land, to master his fate.

III. “Barbed Wire,” a Poem

18Those motifs are also central to the poem entitled “Barbed Wire,” with a detailed analysis of which I’d like to conclude this paper. Here is the poem:

New strung, it sparks a live wire
when sun hits right, and can be
thumbed like guitar strung, its tune
pure country twang, but given
enough time rain rusts metal,
fence posts wobble like loose teeth,
barbed wire burrows in laurel
and goldenrod before found
by fisherman or hunter.
As I found it once, deep in
the Smokies when something latched
to my calf—coil of old strands
not quite elemented back
into ground ore, and though I searched
no chimney-spill or hearthstone,
no sign but rusty fence-thorns
of one whose hammer tapped out
a claim on this land traveling
through bright lines from post to post,
traveling time to a moment
one’s man’s tenuous hold on
the earth snagged like a memory
surfaced long after, time-dulled,
still able to draw blood.
(Rash 2002b, 49)

19“Barbed Wire,” which was published in Raising the Dead, is a 24-line long poem splitting into two parts corresponding to two sentences. From the first part, which includes the first nine lines, to the second one, which covers the last fifteen lines, there is a clear change in focus, as the attention shifts from the initial “it,” which refers to barbed wire, to a first-person speaker, an “I.” It is tempting to associate that “I” with the figure of the poet, though the speaker soon appears to be identifiable as a farmer owning cattle. In this specific instance a calf—be it a young animal or the man’s lower leg10—got enmeshed in a barbed wire fence.

20The object that gives its title to the poem is, unsurprisingly, central to it; but it is displayed through a striking diversity. Indeed, the first nine lines constitute a Ponge-like description of barbed wire as if from its own perspective, clinging as close as possible to the inherent qualities of the object. This is, indeed, a remarkable evolution of Rash’s poetry: in the wake of French poet Francis Ponge’s Mute Objects of Expression, Rash indeed shows an almost “violent taste for things” (Ponge 2008, 3) and complies with Ponge’s injunction to “always go back to the object itself, to its raw qualities, its difference.” The French poet sometimes formulated his poetic directive as a responsibility toward the objects of the world: “The object is always more important, more interesting, more capable (full of rights): it has no duty whatsoever toward me, it is I who am obliged to it” (Ponge 2008, 4). Such resolutions account for why he literally chose to “take sides with things.”11 What Rash has been doing with words, in his poetry but, seamlessly, in his fiction as well, is strongly redolent of Ponge’s poetic project, which his astounding translator, Lee Fahnestock, described as follows: “he would write his own The Nature of Things, would study objects minutely through the senses, through emotions and the intellect, to construct a new form of definition-description” (Fahnestock 2008, 8). As his attention is more and more focused on the inherent qualities of objects, Rash keeps polishing his favorite syllabic line—seven-syllable lines—, which neatly, straightforwardly, describe objects without being stopped by the barbed wire of capital letters.

21In Rash’s poem, barbed wire is prey to the cycles of seasons, as a result of which its aspect and effects are altered. Like Ponge, Rash indiscriminately resorts to the senses: his barbed wire is first evoked through sight (it “sparks”, then “rusts”) and sound (“thumbed,” “tune,” “strung,” “twang”—brief monosyllabic words that somehow mimic the sounds they designate), before its menacing touch is indirectly evoked through a calf’s entanglement. The successive influences of sun and rain inexorably deteriorate the bright newness of barbed wire into a dull, rusty and sagging thing, fated to dig into the vegetation, and eventually disappear. Rash also makes a striking use of similes that further contributes to characterizing, if not animating, the object described: the shift from “thumbed like guitar strung” to “wobble like loose teeth” faces the reader with an experience that is strange enough. Indeed, he/she is encouraged to empathize, even identify, with the deterioration of barbed wire—to experience it as if from within. In the process, the slackening of its initial sparkling tension into the image of “wobbling loose teeth” evokes at the same time infancy and old age, beginnings and endings. Barbed wire thus conveys images of human finitude and, again, brings up the motif of traces: in the last analysis, what is left of things; what is left of us? How does one, object or man, leave a mark? Aren’t we all meant to “elemen[t] back / into ground ore”?

22There’s a significant difference, though, between the fate of barbed wire and that of man, in which respect the reader is faced with a humbling observation. Long after barbed wire has “burrowed” into the earth, whatever remains of it fishermen, hunters or farmers are likely to find, accidentally, on their way across pastures, the “coil of old strands” have “not quite elemented back” into earth—not quite. Unlike man, barbed wire shows a singular resistance: “snagged like a memory / surfaced long after, time-dulled,” it is “still able to draw blood.”12 The vanity of man’s sense of ownership and of his endeavors to dominate the land, to delineate and to claim it as his is thus brought to the fore. Another’s blood might still be drawn long after the individual who, like Holland Winchester, hammered in his sense of proprietorship has passed away. Some objects outlive us and their durability is a statement about our transience and about the evanescence of our urges. This is the “find” (the verb is repeated twice) that lies at the core of “Barbed Wire,” simple, though crucial: “man’s […] hold on the earth” is but “tenuous.”

Conclusion

23The reappearance of barbed wire fences throughout a literary world that is dominated by images, large and small, of the natural world, which keeps reflecting “Rash’s fierce and primal connection to place” (Wilhelm 2014, 1), is particularly revealing of the tension between man and nature that underlies most of Rash’s work. A particularly tenacious image, it sheds light on how man has been trying to appropriate, let alone tame, space across generations; it manifests his characters’ concern with leaving traces in the world they inhabit; it also delineates a space that may be more fluctuating than it first appears.

24Meanwhile, the almost obsessive repetition of barbed wire imagery throughout Rash’s writing, whether he writes prose or poetry, encapsulates his characteristic skill for turning a mundane object into a poetic trope. Particularly evocative of Rash’s depiction of place, barbed wire fences keep fragmenting his literary territory, cutting up the space inhabited by his characters and inducing a singular poetics that floats between genres and times.